Volk

by Piers Anthony

  “If I may, I will give you this,” he said, handing her a small package.

  Quality was surprised. “I have not asked anything from thee, Ernst, or given thee anything. I don’t—”

  “About that I differ. You have given me the pleasure of your company and your trust. But this is merely a book I found in Madrid. It is in French, which I can not read, but I know what it says. I fear you will not like it—”

  “A French book? I can read it, of course. But why would thee assume I wouldn’t like it?”

  “It is Nietzsche. One of the last he wrote before his madness overcame him. But his logic is persuasive. You do not have to agree with him, and surely you will not, but you should understand what he says.”

  Quality was touched. She accepted the book. “Thank thee, Ernst. Thee is right: I must not condemn without understanding. I will read it.”

  He smiled. “I doubt we shall meet again, but if we do, we can argue Nietzsche’s case.”

  “I say this with a certain bemusement,” Quality said as they separated. “But I rather enjoyed our trip together.”

  “I, too.”

  Then he drove away, leaving her by the front of the office. She waved to him with the book.

  • • •

  “I have good news and bad news,” the director told her. “The good news is that we have received word that the parts for the truck are on the way, just when we had almost given up on them. The bad news is that we need someone to go to Vichy France. A trainload of refugees is supposed to be crossing into Spain, and arrangements have to be made in Spain and in France. Since you speak French—”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. She was surprised and glad that Ernst’s word had been so immediately effective; her trip with him had justified itself, though that had not been her reason for it. But to go to Vichy France—that was distinctly nervous business. France had fallen only last month, and the horror of the German advance remained fresh. It had seemed as if the panzer divisions were never going to stop, and that they might plunge right through the mountains to Spain. Fortunately they had stopped, and then the Vichy regime had been set up, and things had stabilized for the time being.

  So it was that she found herself using her repaired truck not to go out on a route, but for driving alone to France. She had to go to Paris to make the arrangements, and the state of transportation was such that it was best to drive across the border and to Toulouse in France, where she could catch a passenger train. There were risks, such as possible confiscation of the truck by the French, but there were risks in any other course of action too.

  The thing was that she had to take along a considerable amount of money in both French and German denominations, because it was a reality of warfare and of travel that nothing could be done without local currency, but no money was allowed to cross international boundaries. So it had to be smuggled across. She had not been involved in this aspect before, and had for some time been naive about it, but she had learned. Her pangs of conscience had settled down to low-grade distress; there just wasn’t any other way to function here. The truck’s spare tire was stuffed with the money. With luck the border inspection would not be thorough enough to expose it.

  The truck had been fixed, but it remained balky on hills, tending to overheat. The road to the border was mostly uphill, because the border ran along the heights of the Pyrenees. She had to drive slowly, and stop frequently to let the motor cool. She was used to it. While she waited, she thought about what she was getting into, for France was now more dubious territory than Spain.

  Apparently the swiftness of the German panzer advance was deceptive: the Germans lacked the personnel to occupy the whole of France directly. Probably they were still digesting Poland, and preparing for the invasion of England. There were rumors that they were preparing to mount a phenomenal air attack on the island, to bomb it into submission so that there would be no effective resistance to occupation by troops. This might explain why they were to let roughly the southern half of France be administrated by a French puppet government whose capital was at a spa town named Vichy.

  The Vichy regime had come into existence on June 16, 1940, under the leadership of Marshal Philippe Petain. He was eighty four years old, and venerated by the French population as a hero of the War—now being termed the First World War, the current one assuming the status of The Second World War. He sometimes pretended to be senile as a political ploy, but he was in excellent health and in full command of his faculties. France had not yet surrendered, but the French had evidently concluded that it was better to have one of their own in charge, than to have the Germans do it. Even spread thin, the Nazis would be vicious.

  Petain was given to simple statements of the obvious, such as “The family is good. Alcoholism is bad.” His first act as leader was to declare his intent to negotiate an armistice with the Germans. The French troops of the region began laying down their arms immediately. General de Gaulle made a radio broadcast from London, vowing to continue the battle against Germany, but he received almost no support. The predominant mood in France was that German victory in Europe was inevitable, and the Vichy regime was attempting to solidify a favorable position for France in the new order.

  Public opinion had turned against England, because England had abandoned France when the Germans invaded. All England had seemed to care about was getting its own forces to safety, in the hasty Dunkirk evacuation. Had they stayed to fight—well, who could say? The English were lucky, the French said, to have a built-in antitank ditch. In three weeks time England’s neck would be wrung like that of a chicken. So the disenchanted French had said as their own country was lost.

  This anti-British attitude was aggravated on July 3 when Britain seized all French ships in British ports. At the same time the British launched a pre-emptive strike against the French fleet in the Mediterranean, based at Mers el-Kebir in Algeria. They had issued an ultimatum: either join the British war effort, sail to a British port with reduced crews, or be disarmed and possibly handed over to the Americans. The French Admiral made a conciliatory counterproposal, but it was too late; the British opened fire. Nearly 1300 French sailors were killed in the assault. In response the French launched a rather timid air assault against Gibraltar. Thus instead of unifying against the Germans, the British and French were fighting each other.

  Quality shook her head, watching the steam pressure in her radiator subside in much the way of the French resistance. The follies of war were eternal. When would men ever choose a better way to settle differences?

  The Germans did not seem to be too brutal, so far. They had declared the historic French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which were along the border, to be part of Germany. Anyone the Germans deemed to be undesirable was simply being expelled to France. It seemed that a lot of people were going to be moved. This was certainly inconvenient for them, but mild compared to what the Germans could have done.

  Meanwhile the Germans seemed happy to have the cooperation of the French administrative machine in the Vichy regime. They seemed to be relying heavily on it to manage day to day activities. Quality understood that the Germans had only ten thousand police of various types available, while the French had over a hundred thousand. Already the German troops were settling down, and truckloads of food were following them in. The folk in the Vichy regime had very little resentment about that!

  Quality shook her head as she resumed driving. Was she becoming favorably inclined to the Germans, because of her recent trip with Ernst? It was not her place to take sides, and she tried to maintain an inner as well as outer attitude of neutrality. But there was no question that Germany was the aggressor here, and Germany had sent the warplanes that had done much of the bombing in Spain. She had no brief for Germany. Yet she could not condemn Ernst, who was a good man. When she had been with him, it had been easy to forget his nationality. Lane was right: her error had been in judging Ernst harshly, without knowing him.

  In due course she achieved the b
order, which was between the Spanish town of Puigcerda and the small French town of Bourg Madame, in a lovely high valley. Not far from here, she knew, was the tiny nation of Andorra. There was a river, and both the Spanish and the French had posts on the bridge, on either side.

  The guards recognized the Quaker truck, for similar trucks had passed this way before. Normally travelers and their vehicles were searched, but in this case they were content to verify Quality’s identification, take a quick look in the back of the truck, which was empty, and pass her through.

  She felt a familiar twinge of guilt. She had lied again, by omission. Legally, she should have declared the money in the tire. But then she would not have been able to complete her mission, rendering the whole trip pointless. How would it have been to have a trainload of refugees denied, because of her conscience? She had been forced, once again, to choose the lesser of evils. But she felt unclean.

  She was in France. It did not look like a conquered land. But what would she find when she left Vichy France and entered the German-occupied section, where Paris was?

  Now her progress was faster, being downhill. She had no trouble reaching Toulouse by nightfall. She paid for several day’s parking in a garage, and got a hotel room for the night. So far she had had no trouble.

  Once settled in, she returned to the truck and carefully transferred the money from the tire to a handbag. From here on it would remain close to her.

  As she lay on the bed to sleep, she thought of the trip with Ernst again. She tried to picture him lying on the floor across the room. She had felt so safe with him there! She did not approve of handguns any more than cannon, but the nearness of that strong man with his gun had been very reassuring. She was almost ashamed of the sentiment.

  • • •

  In the morning she went to the station. The train was late, of course, and she had to wait two hours for it to arrive. Then it required another hour to board. Perhaps it was just her impression, but the French seemed horribly inefficient, as if everything had to be reconsidered at every juncture.

  Quality was glad she had taken the precaution to bring along a book. It was the one Ernst had given her, The Anti-Christ, by Friedrich Nietzsche. She was not a proficient reader in French, and this was her chance to improve. Time was one thing she had, right now. It was a small book, hardly a hundred pages. So she read slowly, and took pains to be sure she understood it. She learned from the introduction that the man had suffered from syphilis and been ill for some time before succumbing completely and becoming a child, mentally. He had been unknown, until in an irony of coincidence, his notoriety suddenly soared during his final decade of life, when his incapacity prevented him from knowing it. Now he was more famous than ever, in Germany, Quality realized, because Adolf Hitler and the Nazis liked him and were encouraging the dissemination of his views. That might account for the presence of a French translation in Spain. She saw that it was a used book, however, so probably it was from someone’s liquidated collection. New books of any type were hard to come by in Spain, after the devastation of the war.

  The train moved slowly, and stopped frequently. Quality was mostly oblivious. Her feelings were profoundly mixed. She had sympathy for the author’s illness, but not for the manner of it: no prudent man should have indulged himself in such a manner as to acquire such a devastating venereal disease. She was tempted to dismiss his views as madness, but they were not; they were a marvel of clarity. Nietzsche had had a fine mind and a precision of expression which came through even in translation. His Foreword was touching: “This book is for extremely few... . The reader must be intellectually honest to survive my passion... . He must desire unconditional freedom... . He must be a superior man in his soul.” How could she argue with that? Yet his thesis was anathema: that Christianity and all its works were an abomination. Therefore it had to be flawed, and she would have to work to discover the exact nature of that flaw.

  It was best, she knew, to be able to state the opposition’s case. Only when a person could do that, could he successfully refute it. But what discipline this required of her! All of her training and belief inveighed against it. Yet what horrified her most was the sheer persuasiveness of the insidious logic. It was not hard to argue Nietzshe’s case. Was she being corrupted by it? It was as if she stood before Satan—the Antichrist, literally—and found herself tempted by his deceptively fair-seeming words. His concept of the Ubermensch, or superman, was not at all the racist doctrine that Hitler espoused; rather it was the universal human cultural goal, toward which all men should strive, the Germans among them.

  The more she read, the more she was satisfied that Nietzsche was not the man that many others claimed. His original views were well worthy of consideration. Her task was not to try to refute him, but simply to refine her thinking to the precision necessary to benefit from his logic. Nietzsche, like Ernst, was perhaps an acquired taste.

  It took a day, and a change of trains, to travel the one hundred and sixty miles from Toulouse to Vichy, but she hardly noticed. The book held her attention throughout.

  But when she got to Vichy, she was informed that they knew nothing about the refugees. The matter was being handled in Paris, almost two hundred miles further north. There was nothing to do but catch another train. Somehow she wasn’t surprised. Perhaps Nietzsche’s savage commentary on the human condition had prepared her for such complications.

  • • •

  Paris really did not look much changed, except for the presence of German soldiers throughout, in their gray-green uniforms. When she passed close to one, she saw that his belt-buckle had the words “Gott mit uns.” She realized that that meant “God with Us.” She hoped not! This was no longer Vichy France, but France Proper— under full occupation. The German officials and soldiers rode public transportation free, and seemed to be having a good time. Not that it made much difference to her; she was here on business, and would retreat to Spain as soon as she had accomplished her purpose.

  The SS headquarters was in the Hotel de Louvre. Quality braced herself, then went to the SS office to inquire. The sight of the black uniformed men gave her a chill. The regular German soldiers were bad enough, but the SS was worse. She was glad that Ernst had been in civilian clothes; that had allowed her to put his business at arm’s length, mentally. Now there was no euphemism possible: she was dealing with the Nazis.

  “Ja, Frëulein,” the officer said in German.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak German,” she said in French.

  “Then I will speak French,” he said in that language. “But I think you are not French.”

  “No. I am American. I am here on behalf of the British Friends Service Council, in connection with a trainload of refugees bound for Spain.”

  “Jews?” he asked sharply.

  “They may be,” she said evenly. “The Spanish officials in Madrid did not inform us.”

  He checked through some papers. “Jews. From the Palatinate area of Germany. A train will take them from Frankfurt to Paris, but there will be a delay until we can commandeer a train to the Spanish border. We will provide the train, but there are costs of transport.”

  “They need to be fed,” Quality agreed. “I am here to buy food for them to eat along the way.”

  “You have the money?”

  “I have French money. I hope it is enough.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You smuggled it across the border, of course.”

  “It was the only way. The Spanish will not let any currency leave the country.”

  “Let me have it.”

  “But it is for food!” she protested.

  “It is for costs of transport. We will see that it is well spent.”

  Quality realized that she would have to turn over the money, though she distrusted this. “You will give me a receipt for it?”

  “Of course.”

  She brought out the packet of francs. The officer counted it and wrote her a receipt. “This should suffice. However, there are al
so the costs of the Frankfurt train. You have German money?”

  It was apparent that the SS knew what it was doing, at least with respect to squeezing the sponge dry. She brought out her packet of marks, and got a similar receipt for it.

  “You will remain in Paris until the transaction occurs,” the officer said. “Here is a reservation for a suitable hotel. Check here with us daily.”

  She wanted to protest, but realized that it would be futile. She would have to wait on their convenience. “Thank you.”

  He smiled. “We can not do too much for a devotee of Nietzsche.”

  He had noticed the book she carried! How would he have treated her if she had not had it? The Nazis were in control here; they could have had her strip-searched or worse, and could have taken the money without giving any receipts. It was possible that Ernst had done her more of a favor than he realized, by giving her the book.

  She turned and left the office, conscious of the officer’s eyes on her. As she emerged to the street she experienced a great easing of her muscles. Only now did she realize how tense she had been.

  But her job was hardly over. She had to hope that it would not take too long for the trains to be arranged, and that the money she had brought would indeed be spent properly. This business was already more complicated than she had anticipated.

  She had some personal money in her purse, as the officer had surely known. Would it be enough to keep her at the hotel as long as she was required to stay? She simply had to hope so. There would also be the expense of food for herself, and the train tickets back to Spain.

  “God will provide,” she told herself. Nevertheless, she took the precaution of stopping at a store and buying some bread and cheese. It was cheap, and it would hold her for some time. Then she had to hurry, because there was a curfew here. Already the streets were clearing of all but Germans, and the main sound was that of their boots as they went on foot patrols. Some had leashed Alsatian dogs who evidently understood only German commands. Some of the men, she saw, were on bicycles, cruising silently along the streets; those would be even more dangerous to anyone in violation of the curfew, because they were silent.